Characterizing Instructional Leader Interactions in a Social Learning Management System using Social Network Analysis

Online learning environments are designed with specific users and respective roles in mind. However, for social systems that thrive on the interaction between and among users, important features are developed based on relationships that evolve over time. Typical learning management systems are designed with the teacher and the student as primary users of the system. my.eskwela is a social learning management system that has been designed for use in public schools in the Philippines with the inclusion of an additional user, the school administrator. Although administrators influence on student learning through mediated effects of instructional leadership, pieces of literature are few that provide evidence of their presence in the learning environment, specifically in the implementation of sLMS. By applying Social Network Analysis in the interaction logs from a sLMS that includes instructional leaders in its implementation, this paper aims to answer the question: Can instructional leadership be manifested in social system interactions? Using measures of centrality in social network analysis, results show that administrators play a key role in the network as main drivers of the network information flow. The results affirm the explicit presence of instructional leadership in the implementation of my.eskwela. In addition, sLMS should provide a means for administrator to monitor activities in enforcing mediated learning to students. Contribution of this study is on the the method to verify the instructional leadership of administrators in its inclusion in the implementation of sLMS

my.Eskwela: Designing An Enterprise Learning Management System to Increase Social Network and Reduce Cognitive Load

A typical learning management system (LMS) provides a tool for teachers to upload and create links to resources, create online assessments and provide immediate evaluation to students. As much as it tries to be student centered, most LMS remains a tool for instruction rather than learning. In a learning generation that is bound by very high online social capital, connectedness to the family weakens. my.Eskwela (My School) redefines LMS to include a parent component to address the need for inclusive participation of parents in the teaching-learning process. Basis for re-design came from the low user acceptance of teachers in using similar system. The study premised that designing an environment that evokes a ”feeling of socialness” through social widgets provides a perceived presence of a social environment that will increase usage of the system. In a majority of the focus group discussion, results showed a more positive evaluation of the system. Precisely, for perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, perceived adoption and intent to use, it can be reasoned that the implementations for reducing the total effort to perform a task and the effect of implementing social interaction in the user-interface has high-impact